My First Job: Boarding School Teacher

Let me start with two scenarios:

Scenario one: It’s 2 am on a Wednesday night. There are four boys in the corridor of your halls rather homo-erotically wrestling and making a lot of noise – they’re so loud that they’ve woken you up. What do you do? Do you open your apartment door, tell them to knock it off and threaten them with Sevens for the next two weeks? Or do you ignore it and hope they’ll get bored and go to bed on their own? There’s an added twist – the students are 18 and 19 year old football and hockey players and you’re 22, scrawny and gay. The only authority you can muster is from the facial hair you’ve forced onto your face and by the fact that these students have to call you Mr. Pohotsky.

Answer: You open the door, in your bathrobe, with your eyes closed and say ‘You have five seconds until I open my eyes, whoever I can still see has to be in the dorm at 7 pm for the next week.’ The students quickly disperse.

Scenario two:  It’s 6 pm on a Friday night. You’re on dorm duty and you’re patrolling a hall as you are meant to occasionally, and you hear a girl giggling through a closed at the end of the hallway – there is no light emanating from beneath the door.  Do you do your job, knocking on the door and then opening it with your key to catch the kids in the act (breaking the co-ed visitation policies and probably doing some horrible heterosexual horizontal tango or whatever they do) or ignore it?

Answer: You knock, wait five seconds and open the door – praying that they haven’t actually gotten down to business just yet.

This was my first job. Fresh out of University, I was a teaching intern at a rather prestigious co-educational boarding school in New Hampshire (if you’re enough of a US political junkie you may have seen many speeches given by republican presidential candidates from our assembly hall). I’ve promised myself that I will not mention the name of the school for fear of this turning into an advertisement but I taught Lighting & Sound Design in the Theatre & Dance Department and looked after a dorm of 54 teenage boys.  I’ll call that dorm Woolworth, in order to protect the [guilty.]

Woolworth is known on campus for housing the best of the sports teams. Mind you, to get into this school you actually have to be bright – there’s a saying at the school: ‘From the dorkiest dork, to the jockiest jock, everyone here’s a nerd’. Nonetheless, Abercrombie could probably recruit some of the older students for their annual catalogue (that and they could knock you to the floor with a proper football tackle). Whenever ‘Woolworth’ is uttered on stage in an all school assembly, one can expect to hear a deep bark like sound of boys trying to sound older than they are cheering ‘WoolWORTH!’ At times it was a bit like the movie Animal House – but with a curfew and without alcohol (at least that’s what we enforced).

There were five other teaching interns at this school of 1000 in what seemed to me like a sleepy little country town (little did I know that by New Hampshire standards, this little town was quite bustling). The one major difference between my experience and the experience of the other interns was that, for some reason, I was given a beautiful 6 room flat, meant for a small family, and they all lived in two room flats – a private room and a room to receive students in during duty hours.

What I eventually discovered, much to my own amusement, was that I was assigned this apartment, and dorm, with a political aim – to quietly inculcate these students, who – if they lived up to their stereotype should verge on homophobic – with the notion that gays are regular people too. This is a very progressive school – in 2001, they were picketed by the Westboro Baptist Church for allowing same sex faculty couples to live together as dorm parents.

Even with this very progressive ‘at-home’ agenda that I was somehow meant to transmit by osmosis, the kids remained utterly clueless. Rumours quickly spread about me and another intern (female) because she and I were spotted ‘taking late night walks after check-in’. This is true – but our late night walks were to the local bar because we were having trouble coping with living in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of teenagers. Apparently we also broke up at some point, but neither of us quite knew exactly when.

This all changed when in January, I suffered a difficult personal loss. I don’t really want to go into it, but let’s just say that if the kids had no idea that I was gay before, they’d have to be a bit thick to fail to receive the hint. The school was extremely understanding – giving me as much time off as I needed, suspending my dorm duties for an entire month. I could hide with the final season of Battlestar Galactica and nobody would give a rat’s ass.

Except, one morning, I woke up to find a card slipped under my door. A few of my students had bought it from the Walgreens Pharmacy 10 minutes down the road from the school. I don’t remember exactly what the card said, but, there, signed in many different coloured pens, were the names of many students throughout the dorm.

Word travels quickly in the world of a boarding school – but even with all the hoots and hollers, the late night hall wrestling, and chest bumps and secret sexy times, that ‘at home’ message that I was unknowingly meant to teach had clearly been received.